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Speak Memory is the title of an evocative memoir written by Vladimir Nabokov. It is a sensualist's recollection of his early childhood through the distilled, self-award perspective of the adult novelist.
It is through the lens of memory and feeling that these landscapes emerge. Although I might draw or photograph a place that is interesting to me as a reference, these paintings; their light, color and tactile surface are about feeling, memory, dream, remembrance, and forgetting.
Are these specific places? Yes. They existed, evolved in my mind as I painted them in the studio, and they exist as real places as works of art. They are as truthful as any experience distilled by circumstance, time, weather, material, and selective memory. They are my fact and fiction.
These are constructed from paper, mylar, older paintings, prints, and collograph plates. They are intentionally artificial, busy and full of movement. Formally the paintings celebrate patin, surface, light and color.
Most recently I've been reading The 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks, and Caste, Isabel Wilkerson and this has informed my subconscious about the forced journey my ancestors made to the Americas. In my mind these current constructed paintings trace a journey to freedom from West Africa, South Carolina, and Virginia. The land of my ancestors is the land of savage beauty.
"I am the dream and the hope of the slave." Maya Angelou
Michael Williamson, 2023
Michael Williamson is a practicing artist living in the Philadelphia area. He has been a teacher of Studio Art and Art History at independent schools in the Delaware Valley and California. Williamson is a graduate of Yale University and Bard College.
Williamson is currently a lecturer and Senior Instructor of Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation.
During the early part of the pandemic the Barnes created Barnes Take-Out, short presentations by curatorial and the education department staff available on YouTube to keep art, ideas, and the Barnes Foundation present in the minds of the public. Michael created content for The Baule Door in Context and West African Art at the Barnes Foundation, Chaim Soutine: Flayed Rabbit that was the lead-in to the exhibition Conversations in Paint: Chaim Soutine and WillemDeKooning.
Williamson has developed course content and taught Color Theory, Watercolors of Cezanne, Charles Demuth and Paul Klee, Painting and Photography, Art and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, The Great Migration, Matisse and Color, Great French Painting: School of Paris, Order and Invention (systems of perspective, proportion, and pictorial organization) as well as lectures on Paul Seurat’s The Models, Cezanne’s Card Players, Picasso and Cubism, Picasso Infinite Invention: Acrobat and Young Harlequin and Girl with a Goat, Horace Pippin: Two Americas, One White, One Black, Separate and Unequal, Matisse and Modernism, CharlesDemuth: The Perfect Moment, and Charles Demuth: American Precisionist.
Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, M.F.A. in Painting
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, B.A., cum laude
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fall term abroad in Rome, Italy
Fallingwater Residency, Mill Run, PA
Art Fellow Residency, Skidmore College
Milton and Sally Avery Scholarship, Bard College
Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut
Philadelphia Board of Education Scholarship In the amount of $2,000 towards four years of college tuition
Studies in Education, Germantown Friends School, Summer 2007 #93 "The GFS Campus: Growth and Change"
Studies in Education, Germantown Friends School, Summer 2004, #87, "Art Matters"
Studies in Education, Germantown Friends School, Spring 1996, #71, “Nazi Rally, Czechoslovakia, 1938”
Academic Forum, Spring 1995, book review, "Makes Me Wanna Holler" Nathan McCall, Random House 1994
Academic Forum, Fall 1994, book review, "Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong" William Kirkpatrick, Simon and Shuster 1992
Healthy Choices Healthy Schools: The Residential Curriculum, chapter entitled
“Minority Faculty”, Avocus Publishing, Inc. 1992
Friends Journal, October 1983, "South Africa"
Georgian, vol. 54, #5, December 1983, "A Work Camp Reaches Africa"
2023
Three Person Show, Cosmopolitan Club, Philadelphia, PA
2022
Group Show, Media Arts Council, Media, PA
Small Works, Group Show Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, NY
2021
Small Works, Group Show, Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, NY
2019
Group Show, Imperfect Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2018
Solo Show, Imperfect Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2019
Group Show, Imperfect Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2016
Solo Show, Cathedral Village, Philadelphia, PA
2013
Faculty Show, Foulkeways, Gwynedd, PA
2009, 2011, 2017
Solo Show, High Point Café, Philadelphia, PA
2007
Group Show, JMS Gallery, Chestnut Hill, PA
2006
Two-Person Show, JMS Gallery, Chestnut Hill, PA
2005
Small Works Show, Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Works on Paper, Group Show, Beaver College, Glenside, PA
2019 - Present
The Barnes Foundation, Adult Education Instructor, Lecturer
Horace Pippin: Two Americas: One White, One Black Separate and Unequal
Alain Locke: Herald of the Harlem Renaissance
Matisse and Modernism
Charles Demuth: American Precisionist
Charles Demuth: The Perfect Moment
The Baule Door in Context– available on YouTube
Benin Bronzes at the Barnes Foundation
Chaim Soutine – available on YouTube
Cézanne: The Card Players
Picasso and Cubism
Picasso: Acrobat and Young Harlequin and Girl with a Goat
Watercolor: Paul Cézanne, Charles Demuth, Paul Klee
Discover the Barnes: African Art at the Barnes Foundation
Introduction to Color Theory
Matisse and Color
Order and Invention: Perspective, Proportion, Composition
Art and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
Painting and Photography
2018 - 2019
The Oxbow School, Head of School
1990-2018
Germantown Friends School, Studio Art, Art History, Administration
